London and the South-East

by David Szalay

  Paul does not know exactly what happened next. The way he understands it, one day Dr John Hall just disappeared.

  So many years later, however, he is, inevitably, still here. It is even possible that Heather is still in touch with him – Paul suspects that he sends her money for the children. It is probably piling up in a savings account somewhere, or invested in sound financial products – Heather would be sensible like that. She has never spoken to him about this money. She has never really spoken to him about John at all, and he has only seen a few photos of him, stumbled on when searching for something else in an obscure drawer.

  Paul often supposes that, in spite of everything, Heather is still in love with John Hall, or with an idealised memory of him. (It was her idea, for instance, that they move to Brighton, where he had left her – and troubled by its associations with him, Paul, though wanting to leave London, had insisted on Hove.) And during these periods of jealousy especially, he finds himself objecting to the way in which he helps to support the doctor’s children, while at the same time never being allowed in any way to supplant him as their acknowledged father. There is, Paul sometimes feels, something humiliating about this. And far from improving with time, it seems to have become worse.

  When he goes downstairs, once more in stockinged feet, the rain is falling steadily through the twilight outside, puddling the old tarmac and uneven pavements of Lennox Road. Soon Heather will be home from work, and the children from school. And while, standing at the window, he is thankful to be inside, out of the weather, this is tempered – more than tempered, almost entirely undermined – by the depressing, inescapable sense that he is a prisoner, unable to walk out, and stay out.

  13

  HE HAS NOT hitherto been used to having the house to himself. They have not, that is, spent much time alone together – Paul and the house – and soon they sit in awkward silence, the small talk exhausted, the situation odd. The house, in particular, is a shy, taciturn presence, and just to lift the hush that hangs so heavily in its interiors, Paul finds himself telling it whatever pops into his head. He has hardly thought, since the week of make-believe when Heather dropped him at the station every morning and he had no work to go to, of his former fellow salesmen, his erstwhile mates. The Christmas holidays ensued, and he never thought of them when he was on holiday. So it was not until well into the second week of January – when the sense of an extra-long Christmas was slowly shading into something else, something disquietingly shapeless and open-ended – that, lying on the sofa somewhere in the level afternoon, he found himself telling the empty house about them. About Murray, for instance – Murray Dundee, the Croc. Paul explains to the house that Murray’s nickname in fact predates the 1986 film usually taken to be its inspiration. (Though, of course, a new and extraordinary element of hilarity was added when posters for something called Crocodile Dundee suddenly started to appear.) No, the nickname was inspired, he understands, by Murray’s smile – a long, cold, crocodilian thing. His memories of Murray in the early days, when he worked for him at Burdon Macauliffe, are murky. It is strange, though, to think that Murray was younger then than Paul is now. He has a memory – he tells the empty house – of watching a rugby match in a pub on the river somewhere. Putney or somewhere. Rain falling into the grey river. The terraces of the pub wet and deserted. Raindrops beading the outdoor furniture. Murray was there, and Lawrence, and Eddy Jaw … The house seems unimpressed by this plotless little fragment, and Paul moves on.

  Years later. Northwood. Fucking dial-a-deal. It was fun – everyone making so much money in the smart little office overlooking Fleet Street. To listen to the men who were there, you would think that every pitch was a deal. It was not like that, of course. Still, there were undoubtedly more deals than usual. Made twelve thousand pounds in a single month, Paul says proudly. (Perhaps the house is impressed, perhaps not.) Murray had had enough money to find four thousand for a personalised number plate for his Sierra. What was it?

  M56 RRA.

  And Paul remembers laughing – farting with laughter in the shadowy interior of the Chesh – and Eddy screaming in Murray’s unsteadily smiling face, ‘You could have got a better fucking car for that!’ There was – though it was obviously something to do with the money, there seemed to be more to it than that – there was an air of insouciance about that time. They could do what they wanted – that was the prize of success. There were long liquid lunches in the Wine Press, and later spliffs in Gough Square, in the vibrant stillness of the shade.

  In those days all the work was done in the mornings – and work was done. The mornings had a frenetic, wild-eyed quality. Eddy, Paul, Murray, Mundjip – all shouting into their phones.

  … calling from International Money Publications…

  … is Mr Jadoul there? I need to speak to Mr Jadoul…

  … the world’s leading banks and insurance companies…

  … that’s very good news, Mr Nicelli…

  … so if I could just confirm that…

  Some of them standing on their desks, some sitting under their desks, the strong draught from the windows dispersing the cigarette smoke, the numbers on the whiteboard multiplying all the time. They had the togetherness, the loudmouth mutual self-assurance of a winning sports team. Tuesday was payday – when the trophies were handed out. In turn, they would go up to Simon’s office to collect their cheques – written in front of their eyes with his gold fountain pen – for two, three, four thousand pounds. And Simon himself was not a negligible ingredient in the extraordinary savour of that time. He was like a pig in shit – buying champagne, paying for taxis, five-hundred-pound bottles of Pomerol at El Vino, dinner at the Ivy. He was munificent – and no wonder – he was making as much money as all of them put together. He wanted them to love working for him, and they did. For two months.

  Then the fateful phone call from Nigel at IM.

  Then the Diaspora.

  And then …

  Yes, that.

  Paul sighs (the house is tactfully silent) and, swinging his feet onto the carpet, sits up. He moves through to the kitchen. The house is still listening – mildly, like a mental-health professional. For a while he says nothing, lost in his own numb non-thoughts. He opens the fridge. Shuts it. The green digits of the oven clock say that it is two. That was always the pivotal point of the day, he mentions. Two o’clock. The point at which, in the various pubs of his sales life – in the Duke of Argyll, in the Greyhound, in the Prince Albert, the Windlesham Arms, the Red Lion, the City Darts, the Ten Bells, the Seven Stars, the Gun, the Crown, the Golden Heart, the White Hart, the White Swan, the Perseverance, the Nag’s Head, the Devonshire Arms, the Punch Tavern, the Captain Kidd, the Coach and Horses, the Prospect of Whitby, the Old Bell, the Tipperary, the West Wall, the Printer’s Devil, the King and Keys, the Masons Arms, the Edward VIII, the Cheshire Cheese, the Old Bank of England, the Old King Lud, the Cittie of Yorke, the Finnegans Wake, the Tom Tun, the Shakespeare’s Head, the Fitzroy Tavern, the W. G. Grace, the Castle, the Chequers, the Prince of Wales, the Ellesmere Arms, the Stage Door, the Sherlock Holmes, the Carpenters Arms, the John Keats, the Head of Steam, the Rose and Crown, the Prince Rupert, the Lord Clyde, the Colonies, the Cricketers, the Adam and Eve, the World’s End, the Bag O’ Nails, the White Horse, the Marlborough Arms, the Green Man, the Bunch of Grapes, the George, the Dolphin, the Duke of York, the Saracen, the Blackbird, the Hand and Racquet, the Blue Posts, the Barley Mow, the Belgrave Arms, the Dover Castle, the Golden Lion, the Goose, the Bull, the Eight Bells, the Two Chairmen, the Constitution, the Duke of Wellington, the Northumber land Arms, the Blind Beggar, the Feathers, the Beehive, the Phoenix, the Bear, the Sussex, the Crown and Anchor, the Anglesey Arms, the Oxford, the Windmill, the Fox and Hounds, the Three Compasses, the Cask and Glass, the Crossed Keys, the Lamb and Flag, the Man in the Moon, the Cock, the Stag, the Builders Arms, the Hour Glass, the Wheat Sheaf, the Windsor Castle, the City Tram, the Lord High Admiral, the Morecombe Arms, the Grenadier, the
Queen Anne, the Catherine Wheel, the Bell, the Angel, the Rising Sun, the Robin Hood, the New Moon, the King’s Arms, the Star and Garter, the Mitre, the Magpie, the Flag, the Ship, the Plough, the Melton Mowbray and the Penderel’s Oak – two o’clock was the point at which they had to make up their minds what to do. Until then, there was always a sort of tension, a tension which peaked on two o’clock; and when, at two o’clock, Paul imagined leaving the pub – stepping out onto the pavement and walking back to the office – he would usually dismiss the idea as impractical. Pointless. Naive. Imagining, for a moment, stepping into the rain that he saw was starting to fall outside, the hurrying people, the thrusting black taxis with their headlights on for the early gloom, he would inwardly shudder. So they would usually stay, especially in the second half of the week; and the first post-two o’clock pint produced an immediate sweet easing – a sudden luxurious expansion of time, ‘all sense of being in a hurry gone’. (A phrase he remembers from somewhere.) Later, however, it might start to seem that perhaps it would not have been entirely impractical, or pointless, to have put in a few hours’ work – hence the penitential tinge so typical of four forty-five.

  On the sofa – his feet on one of its arms, his head propped on the other – smoking a cigarette, he addresses the silent house like a shrink. Yes, the penitential tinge, in the warm, low light of the Penderel’s Oak – the moving light of the fruit machines, the heat lamps of the food servery, and the illuminated front of the cigarette machine – a picture of a rabbit or a hare, he never knew which, squatting vulnerably in American scrubland, and in big blood-red letters, the single word, LUNCH. They never ate lunch, he and Murray.

  Lying on the sofa, he finds himself thinking of one particular afternoon – the afternoon of Murray’s salesman’s tiff with Marlon. It was two o’clock. Murray was smiling, and somewhere in his smile he was issuing an imploring plea. Paul was not sure what it was about exactly, Murray’s tiff with Marlon. He knew, however, that Murray wanted to stay away from the office. That was what he was silently pleading for. Paul looked at his watch. With a series of soft impacts he stubbed out his cigarette. Murray, the smile still fixed in the folds of his face, must have thought that Paul’s hesitation was simply a form of sadism. Paul even wonders, supine on the sofa, whether it was. He thinks not, however. That day – he informs the house – the penitential tinge had appeared early, while there was still time to leave the pub and put in a few hours’ work. So it was out of kindness, out of a sort of softness – which, he was sadly aware, must somehow put him at a disadvantage in life – that he had finally said, ‘Well … What you having then?’

  And that night – that very night – Murray had spoken to Eddy Jaw.

  Why? Was it because he had taunted him about his Merc? Yes, he had taunted Murray about his Merc. When he landed the post-two-o’clock pints on the table, he saw that Murray had taken one of his cigarretes – Murray never had his own cigarettes – and seating himself, he said, his voice full of sympathy, ‘Still having trouble with the car finance people?’

  ‘The finance people?’

  ‘Yeah. When’s the next payment?’

  ‘Um, it’s in, er …’ Murray looked up at the ceiling, which was the colour of pie crust. ‘Two weeks, something like that.’ Paul knew that that was a lie. The next payment was due on Monday. Keen not to talk about it, Murray said, ‘You got anything out there?’

  ‘Parking’s a bit of a nightmare, though,’ Paul said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Murray shook his head. The word ‘parking’ was unpleasant for him to hear, provoked a stab of pain – his long silver S-Class being at that moment immobilised in Little Russell Street, as he had found when he went there mid-morning to put another twenty quid in the meter. ‘So you got anything out there?’ he said. ‘Or what?’

  For a moment Paul was silent. ‘This and that. You know. This and that.’ And Murray immediately started to talk about something else – something that he had ‘out there’. ‘There’s this goldfish breeder,’ he said. ‘Fucking Singaporean goldfish breeder. His name’s … It’s spelt … N G. How the fuck do you pronounce that?’ Paul shook his head slowly. ‘How the fuck do you pronounce that?’ Murray said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Paul. Murray said, ‘How the fuck do you pronounce that?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Paul, staring at the green illuminated exit sign.

  ‘I said to him, I said to him, it’s the latest fucking big thing. Did you not know that? I’m talking about corporate HQs. Fucking fish tanks. Fucking aquariums …’

  Paul was not listening.

  Lying on the sofa, eyeing the off-white ceiling, he wonders what sort of friendship was expressed in that not untypical slice of time. Is it normal, he wonders – seeking the opinion of the silent house – for friendship to be such a mesh of irritations, of sly wounding stabs, of one-upmanships, of tedium? Surely not. There would seem to have been little, then, for either Murray or himself to traduce when they made their symmetrical pacts with Eddy Jaw. And there was a symmetry there. Though not a perfect one, of course. Nor, obviously, was the outcome symmetrical. But would he swap places with Murray now?

  He imagines Murray, now, on – what is it? – Wednesday afternoon. Two thirty. Marooned on a wide grey sales floor, lying for a living. Struggling to sell space in pretend publications. Trying to talk impatient strangers into doing what is not in their interests. Losing sleep over notional sales targets. Smarting at the slap of blowouts. Marshalling muppets. Being bossed by Eddy Jaw. And seeing what a mistake he has made – two weeks into January, and not one sale – Eddy will be starting to lose it, starting to fly into eye-popping storms of anger, the veins on his neck standing up, his face the colour of sunstroke. And Murray sitting there, making small munching movements with his mouth, feebly trying to smile – trying to make light of it – while Eddy, in a plaid Hugo Boss suit, smashes the white plastic handset of Dave Shelley’s phone against the plasterboard wall.

  Paul stands up – is woozy for a moment – then searches for his plastic pouch of tobacco and king-size papers. Once more sitting on the smooth floral fabric of the sofa, he starts to make a spliff. He had promised himself not to smoke one until five o’clock. However – he spells it out, though the house has made no objection – he has nothing to do, so there seems no point not being stoned. Stoned, everything seems further away, quite far away – as if seen from on holiday, or in hospital. And the tedium of the level afternoon is numbed. The house is tolerantly silent. Or does he – as he dusts the hash from his fingerprints – does he sense a hint of disapproval? A slight sad shake of the head? An almost inaudible sigh?

  *

  He is half asleep when a key scratching at the front-door lock prefaces the noisy ingress of Heather and the children. Oliver, in his school uniform, looks into the sitting room. He sees Paul lying on the sofa, like a hieroglyphic of a sleeping man – his legs tucked up, his hands under his head. Lazily, he opens his eyes. ‘All right, Oli?’ he mumbles. ‘Was just having a little nap.’

  14

  IN THE END it is Heather who finds him a job. From the kitchen, she hears him enter the hall – there is something exhausted about the way the front door shuts.

  He has been in Brighton, talking to a street sweeper named Malcolm. It is mid-January – the 20th in fact – ‘almost February’ – and he had found, advertised in the Argus, ‘a vacancy in this high-profile operation for street sweepers’. The ‘operation’, once again, was Brighton and Hove Council. The only requirement of the job was ‘being able to stand up for eight hours a day’.

  We are looking for hard-working, conscientious people who can work on their own with minimal supervision. Being able to stand up for 8 hours a day in all weather conditions is essential. Does this sound like you? If so, you could be who we are looking for.

  The problem was that Paul was not sure if he could stand up for eight hours a day. And after his failures with Woburn and the Wyevale Garden Centre, he knew that he would not
survive failure here. He had no experience of ‘cleansing’, had never undertaken a ‘litter pick’ – things which would surely weigh against him. The only other job he had even made enquiries about was a grave-digging post at Hove cemetery. Immediately excited by the possibilities of this – its rich nihilism, its ghoulish glamour, its echoes of Hamlet – he had phoned to ask if it was absolutely necessary that applicants be licensed to operate a mini excavator, and had been told that, yes, it was absolutely necessary. That was the job. Or at least the most important part of it. There would be some hand digging as well. Some of the other duties – they might have been off-putting to other people, or to himself at other times – positively attracted him. To work outdoors ‘to depths of seven feet in confined spaces’, to ‘lift grave shuttering boards’, to ‘locate graves for interments’, to ‘reopen graves’, to ‘assist at exhumations’. It had been disappointing about the mini excavator. Very disappointing. And moreover he was sure that it was Woburn he had spoken to when he phoned to ask about it. It was the same department – cemeteries, parks and open spaces.

  Prudently, Paul decided to find an existing street sweeper and have a word with him. See what the job involved – there was no point trying for it if he did not think that he would be up to it, if it was pie in the sky. And it was thus that he found himself in conversation with Malcolm on the Brighton seafront opposite the conference centre – he had walked into town, where he wasn’t known – one sunny afternoon. ‘We don’t just sweep up chips and condoms,’ Malcolm was saying. ‘I picked up a bra the other day.’ He was leaning philosophically on his barrow, with stained fingers bringing the last damp, smokable centimetre of his roll-up to rocky lips. The exhaled smoke was accompanied, lower down, by a guttural shifting of phlegm. He cleared his throat. His face was delicate, russet-bearded, bespectacled, some grey hairs in the beard. There was something childlike about him, Paul thought. Also something of the intellectual – he had a self-conscious, thoughtful, measured way of speaking. ‘There’s this habit of public “grazing”, isn’t there?’ he said. Paul nodded sombrely. ‘When I started, twenty years ago, there was just the one fast-food outlet, a fish and chip shop in a back street. Now there’s takeaways everywhere.’